How GIS Has Changed Our World

VERTICES

These maps from 2010 show the availability of grocery store locations and also the percentage of people who had a car to get there. The topic of food availability is already an interesting conversation.. is there enough food? Is there enough food, but it just isn’t distributed evenly? Why is healthy food more expense then unhealthy? Why has food become more of a business then of a way to survive? Take a look at these maps, because they bring another problem into the mix! Transportation and accessibility.

The information for the maps was collected from the USDA Food Environment Atlas and the maps were created by Meharry Medical College.

Healthmap.com is a great site to quickly and easily see health alerts and information around you. When you go on the site, you can let the site access your location and immediately health alerts pop up. The picture below shows 89 alerts around central NJ this past week. Click on the data points to view more information about the disease and the location.

Stay alert & stay healthy! Thanks healthmap.com for the information. Go to healthmap.com to see more.

Take a look at this announcement from the EPA about the EJSCREEN Webinar-

After a year of public engagement and collecting feedback from stakeholders, EPA is announcing the release of the latest version of EJSCREEN, the agency’s environmental justice screening and mapping tool. The new EJSCREEN has an abundance of new features – all of which were requested by the public – including (to list a few):

The inclusion of the National Air Toxic Assessment environmental indicators for cancer risk, respiratory, and diesel PM

Scalable maps, that summarize data at the Census block group, tract, or county-level

The ability to save sessions and print maps from the home screen

A feature that allows you to look at two maps, side-by-side

The addition of Puerto Rico

The EPA will be hosting three webinars to engage with EJ stakeholders on questions about the new data and design of EJSCREEN as well as a discussion of how EJSCREEN is being used. These webinars will include a basic overview of the tool, and will not be technical in nature. Please register for the event via the EventBrite page.

We took CDC respiratory risk data from the Centers for Disease Control and mapped respiratory risk across the country at the county level. Red shows the highest risk areas with blue showing the lowest. Want to see how your county rates? Check out our map below!

Take a look at this interesting map we made on Mappler in collaboration with Planning Communities! The map is full of GIS layers that you can toggle to show various information such as crime, food, recreation, transit, and URISA health data in DC. The picture below shows URISA data marking sidewalks, intersections, homeless locations, and garbage. Visit the map to view all the data ! nj.mapplerx.com/map/urisahealth

The National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education, in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The John A. Hartford Foundation, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, is soliciting proposals designed to accelerate the development of creative, robust and sustainable interprofessional initiatives in which graduate nursing and one or more other professions actively learn and work together with individuals and their families in community-based clinical settings (nexusipe.org).

The goal of the initiative is for health and other professional schools, with a history of collaboration, to work together with a community partner and the individuals and families that it serves to develop innovative, creative and sustainable interprofessional clinical initiatives that accelerate their existing interprofessional education (IPE) and collaboration (IPC) work (nexusipe.org).

Closing Date– July 15, 2016 11:59pm EDT

Winners Notified– September 15, 2016

Funding Opportunity– “Up to 20 graduate nursing programs that collaborate with one or more professional schools and a community clinical setting will receive up to $50,000 for a two-year initiative” (nexusipe.org)

Eligibility–

Applicants must be an accredited nursing school with graduate programs committed to working in partnership with other health and non-health related professional schools and a community-based clinical partner.

Applicants must partner with at least one other professional school (health or non-health) and a community-based clinical site.

The principal investigator must be a faculty member in a nursing school/program, based in the United States or its territories.

Proposals that demonstrate existing inter-professional relationships that will be accelerated by this funding are encouraged.

This map on michiganradio.org from February 1st, depicts the results of home lead tests in Flint. The test information, gathered by the State, was then grouped into the following categories to make this map:

0 ppb – no lead detected in the drinking water

1-4 ppb – the EPA deems this range as acceptable

5-14 ppb – exposure is a concern, but still below an EPA “federal action level”

15-49 ppb – a range above the federal action level for lead, but can be treated by filters

50-149 ppb – reaching dangerous levels, but can be treated by filters

150 and above – a range at which the federal government says water filters might not work

Looking at this map, trying to determine the source is difficult because no real pattern can be determined. Makes you think about what other areas in the US have horrible water that either hasn’t been discovered yet, or just taken seriously.